I see the night sky as a jewellery store window and my mind is half a brick

What Lost has done is far beyond that, truly raising the bar for much mainstream media. Again, it's ever clearer - frankly it was at the time - that all those late-90s Flash experiences, grown out of early-90s CD-ROM experiments, were largely facile attempts at 'new media experiences'. Lost is a far more ambitious piece of media, which uses the entire web as its canvas and its entire audience as its creators. I'd suggest this piece of work - Lost, when viewed in its entirety - is truly new.

There are frequent references throughout the post to Steven Johnson "Everything Bad is Good for You" and his article in the Times specifically about Lost. This is a facinating insight into how traditional and new media are merging to create a something unique.

I just finished listening to Tom Coates Native to a Web of Data talk from The Future of Web Apps Carson Workshop and viewing the slides from his presentation. I think this is a seminal piece of work which seems to perfectly capture the key issues that all web developers should be thinking about at the moment (what Matt Biddulph describes as the renaissance in web thinking). He summarises the issues as:

Top-down instruction may seem more appropriate in some environments, but may not be effective in the long-term as if the team leader stops actively making subordinates use the software, they may naturally give up if they have not become convinced of its usefulness. Bottom-up adoption taps into social incentives for contribution and fosters a culture of working openly that has greater strategic benefits. Inevitably in a successful deployment, top-down and bottom-up align themselves in what Ross Mayfield calls ‘middlespace’.

Having witnessed so many software/communication projects grinding to a halt through poor uptake I think that this type of approach has a lot going for it. Too often all the energy is focused on the technology rather than the whole product.

Euan Semple's talk at LIFT06 (Life, Ideas, Future Together) conference about new technologies and people has been published by Freestudios.tv on the Audio/Video page. He's in good company along with Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Matt Jones and Robert Scoble.

Euan Semple has been covered in a number of articles (in the FT Encouraging Information Sharing and The Knowledge in Inside Knowledge) talking about some of the low cost knowledge sharing tools that he introduced into the BBC. His approach is very tempting as it focuses on light weight tools such as wikis and blogs rather than more heavy handed and expensive 'enterprise' solutions.

There's a profile of Euan on the LIFT06 site and there's plenty of views and info on his blog The Obvious.